DIY ombre Keds

 Hey guys! I hope you have all had a great summer! Although it is over, I am very excited to be starting college at TAMUCC. Right before school started, I saw this pin on Pinterest and decided that I would try my own version! The ones that the original blogger made were green, but I wanted to do blue because: 1. I thought the glitter would be easier to find, and 2. because blue is our main school color. 

In her DIY tutorial, she says that she bought a product called Setacolor finish fabric paint and mixed the different shades of glitter into it and painted them on the shoe. I could not, for the life of me, find this product at any of my local craft stores, so what I did buy was Tulip fashion glitter bond. This product is made specifically for bonding loose glitter to fabric, so I figured it would work just as well. 

*(I also bought graduated shades of blue glitter that came with 4 colors sectioned off in one jar, rather than buying individual jars of glitter. For me, this made the process of finding the right shades a lot easier.)*

I already had a pair of old Keds-look-alikes from when I was in a play in high school, so at first, I used those. I mixed the glitter into the adhesive and painted it on from lightest to darkest, heel to toe, as she instructed.

I had many complications with this method. I don't know if it is because I was using a different product, (and the fact that the one she used was tinted silver), but I had a very hard time painting on the glitter to make a solid coat over the shoe. The glitter would ball up and I had to paint almost three coats until it was pretty much solid. I finished a whole shoe (which didn't look bad, but didn't look very good either) until I realized that I got the glitter colors mixed up and they were not painted on lightest to darkest. The texture of the shoe was also very rough once the paint dried because of the way the glitter balled up when I was painting it on. 

As a simple fix, I drove to our nearest Wal-Mart and bought another pair of shoes for a whopping FIVE dollars. $$$ Before starting the next pair I emptied a tiny bit of each color of glitter next to each other and decided the order of lightest to darkest. (You may think that I would have thought of this the first time, but, alas, I did not.) Next, I wrote numbers on the bottom so that I would remember the order throughout the process. 

On this pair of shoes I took a completely different approach to making the shoes. Instead of mixing the glitter with the adhesive, I painted on the adhesive in sections, starting at the heel, just like last time, and then empties the glitter onto a paper plate and dipped the painted part of the shoe into the glitter. This was pretty difficult, so I ended up sprinkling it on and it worked fine. I completed the rest of the instructions as written and painted Mod Podge over the shoe afterwards to create a seal. This pair of shoes turned out much smoother in texture, and more correct in color gradient. 

One last thing that I would recommend: if you are going to cover the edge of the sole in painter's tape like I did, be prepared for it to leave a sticky residue on the bottoms like shown in the picture above. I would buy some WD40 and apply it to the edges of the sole with a cotton ball or tissue to take off the sticky layer.

And voila! There they are!

xoxo